Tech Brew Ride Home - (IHP Bonus) Mike Slade on NeXT and Steve Jobs' Return to Apple

Episode Date: April 29, 2023

Another bonus episode from the Internet History Podcast. I originally wanted to talk to Mike Slade about Starwave, the innovative company that launched some major names onto the web, including ESPN.com, ABCNews.com, MrShowbiz.com, and after an eventual sale to Disney, put together the pieces that eventually became the Go.com portal play. But Mike is one of those guys who has had such a varied and interesting career, I couldn't help but go into other eras of his career. The dude worked at Microsoft in the early 1980s. He worked at NeXT in the early 90s. And from 1998 through 2004 he was Special Assistant to Steve Jobs as he saved Apple as a company, launched the iPod and kicked into motion the modern gadget era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Internet. History Podcast. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. I originally wanted to talk to Mike Slade about Starwave, that innovative company that launched some of the major names onto the web, including

ESPN.com, ABCNews.com, Mr. Showbiz, and others. And after an eventual sale to Disney, put together the pieces that would become the go.com portal play. But Mike is one of those guys who has had such a varied and interesting career, I couldn't help but go into other areas. I mean, the dude worked at Microsoft in the early 1980s. He worked at Next in the early 90s. And from 1998 through 2004, he was special assistant to Steve Jobs as Jobs came in and first saved Apple as a company, but then launched the iPod and kicked into motion the modern gadget era as we know it. So we'll get into all of that in this excellent, wide-ranging conversation with Mike Slade, CEO of Starwave.

Mike Slade, thanks for coming on the Internet History podcast. My pleasure. So I usually on the show ask questions like what was it like to go to work at Google in 2000 or Facebook in 2005. But let's start with you by asking what was it like to go to work from Microsoft and what was it, 1983? Yeah, it's funny that you say that because I was going to Stanford Business School, and when I went up there to interview, I didn't really know what they did. At the time, they were private, and Lotus and Ashton Tate were public, and all they mostly made were languages and operating systems and compilers and flight simulator, and Multiplan was also ran spreadsheet, and Word hadn't shipped yet, and the Mac hadn't shipped yet, and no one really knew what they were. So I went up there for an interview. I was from the Northwest, and I really wanted to live in the Northwest,

and so I interviewed at Nike, and I wasn't a world-class runner, so they didn't hire me. And even though Phil Knight was a Stanford MBA, and then I went to interview Microsoft, and lo and behold, they made me a job offer, and I took it, and I didn't really, I have to say, I'm not being suspicious, I didn't really know what they did when I got there. I mean, I'm not kidding. I didn't really know. People say, what do they do when I go, software? It didn't really know.

Can I intuit from that that you maybe weren't like a big-time computer guy at this point? You know, I wasn't a programmer. I had worked. What had happened to me was I had gone to college. I had been an economics major. And while I was in college, I was a sports writer for a daily newspaper. First, I was the sports editor of the college paper. And while I worked there, it went digital.

So it was one of the first papers in the country to go digital, which meant that I was manipulating the entire AP wire on a screen, a mini-computer-based screen in 1978, helping the sports editor lay the paper out and write stories. So not many people were doing that then, like maybe a few hundred in the whole United States. So the Colorado Springs Gazette was, I think, the sixth paper in the country to go digital, every else had typewriter still in manual typesetting machines. And so I was pretty facile with using a computer, if you will. I wasn't a programmer, but I understood how to use things like E-Max.

So when I was in Stanford Business School, I was famous because I knew how to write on a computer. computer, not a micro, not a, they had a mini computer system that everyone used and I could, so I was the designated paper writer. Everyone loved me because I, we didn't have to type papers. I could edit them on a word processing program. So I was computer facile, if you know what I mean. And I loved technology and I loved computers and people like that and at Microsoft, they liked that. So yeah, when I got there, I was not a programmer. And this guy, Pete Higgins, who's now my venture capital business partner, he and I were kind of the first virgin MBAs, Microsoft ever hire, you know, guys who weren't technical, hadn't worked in the industry,

and we just were hired kind of like Procter and Gamble hired product managers. Oh, wow. We were the first. Wow. So we showed up, yeah, in 1983. Right, and so. Microsoft, 400 people, maybe. Right, so it's still a small company.

So this is them maybe trying to, trying to grow up and become a big boy company at this point, maybe? Well, Steve Ballmer was the guy who hired everybody. He was also a Stanford MBA. So, although he had dropped out famously to go to work for Microsoft. So he was interviewing Stanford MBAs, and the year before, three people had been offered jobs, and they'd all turned him down, believe it or not. And so Pete and I were his prizes because we actually said yes. So we came there, and another guy from Wharton came there.

We were kind of their first sort of NBA pledge class, you know, like Procter & Gamble. And the people have, and General Mills have, you know, they used to whole groups of MBAs or consulting firms. And we were the only guys in our class who did anything like that. Most people either went to work for, you know, the 300 people in our graduating class. at Stanford Business School, and most of them either went to work for consulting firms or investment banks or consumer products companies like Free L.A. or something. So, or General Mills. Nobody did what we did. So we were considered weird. Another funny thing was that a guy who was one of Pete's best friends, he went to work for digital research,

which is kind of Microsoft's rival then. Right. And they were in Santa Cruz or actually Pacific Grove, which is a suburb of Santa Cruz. And both Pete and I kind of thought that, like, maybe he'd done better than us because it was such a fun place to live. right. Little did we know they were doomed, right? But anyway, so I went there, and the story I like to tell people as I got there on a Friday night of Labor Day weekend, fresh from my honeymoon in Europe.

And so it was Friday night at a Labor Day weekend, and I had this complicated plan to spend the night at a hotel across the street from Microsoft and Bellevue and then go to Portland for the weekend where I was from and get organized and come to work after Labor Day weekend. So I got to the hotel, which is across the street from New York. old Microsoft building at 1130 on a Friday night of Labor Day weekend and they didn't there was no reservation for me. No one knew who I was and I was kind of confused. So I just I didn't really know what to do. I didn't have a credit card. I didn't have any money and so I went across the street

to the Microsoft building that I didn't do one time before and in the basement there was a phone and it was one of those phones that rang in the whole building you know in the old days those kind of phones did they were called the night bell. So I pick up the phone at 1130 on Friday night of a later day weekend and the phone rings like 20 times and Jeff Rakes who later was my boss at Microsoft answers the phone at 1130 on Friday night of Labor Day weekend and I go Jeff it's Mike I'm back from my honeymoon blah blah blah blah and he introduced me and he goes I'm in a meeting what do you need because they're all working out and I go Friday night of Labor Day at 1130 and they were about to launch word 1.0 that's why they were working so hard and I was like he was like just just

you know, we'll pay you back. I'll get the room, get out of here. So I tell me, I'm like, we're in big trouble here. People work really hard. You know. So what it was like was a place where people worked really, really, really hard. Yeah, let me expand on that a little bit. Before we move on to other things, when you, you know, you still work with startups today.

And do you see the same DNA fundamentally in how things worked back then with how things worked today? Or is there, are there significant differences from your, ready era that you've been able to see? Well, it's hard to compare because you couldn't get any work done then unless you came to the office. Remember, there was no internet, and if you were going to connect to a computer remotely, you were going to do it on a 2400 bod modem in 1983, right? So there was no such thing as high-speed connections. Now, Bill Gates, even in those days at Microsoft had a T-1 line to his house, but that's because

he was Bill Gates, right? Nobody else did. So if you wanted to do any work, whether it was email or writing something, something or programming, you got to go to work. You get to be in the office. So it's a really different vibe than now where you can work whenever you want. You can go to Starbucks. Nobody really cares.

As long as you get your work done, they don't really care. And so then, and people are always on. Now they have smartphones and everything. So you just can only imagine. Balmer and Gates used to walk the halls at night on weeknights to see who was working when. And on Saturdays, Steve would walk the parking lot to see whose car was in the parking lot, see who was working. and your bonus was about 50% what you did and 50% how hard you worked.

So if you were a complete screw up but you worked really hard, they gave you a pretty good bonus because it was kind of like a factory, right? His whole thing was the software factory. So that was the thing. Microsoft was going to have these tools, and unlike their competitors, they had a really strong approach to their tools philosophy and they were going to have better tools.

else their program would be more efficient. So it's a very strange atmosphere. So I don't know if it's the same now or not. It's kind of hard to compare because people still work really hard, but it's just different. Like you talk to people who work at Amazon here in Seattle, and they say it's a meeting culture and that you've got to be there all the time. So that would be similar in some respects. Other companies aren't really like that.

When I ran my company, I didn't care when you work as long as you worked hard. So to put a little bit of a bow on the Microsoft era, I'm sure you wore many hats. I see that you worked on flight simulator, Excel, when Excel launches. Yeah, I launched Excel. Right. So what just in general, what was your main role at Microsoft? I was a product marketing guy. Pete and I, like I said, were kind of the first crop of product marketing guys who were supposed to be kind of in the mold of what people did at General Mills or Procter & Gamble,

where we were kind of the bridge between the consumer. sales and the developers. Because before that there really wasn't one. And in most companies, there isn't one. And what Microsoft had was a pretty strong, because of Jeff Rakes and Bill's vision, they had a really strong product management organization early on that you were kind of the advocate inside the company to get stuff done and to get resources assigned to your product inside of somebody else's product.

And so it was kind of a weird mixture of detail-oriented and sales, internal sales, if you will. And then you were the external ambassador for the product, whatever product that was. So that's all I did. I was a marketing guy. I did Excel. I did works. I was in charge of all the Mac products. I was for a while. I had the unenviable job for like two years of being kind of Microsoft's ambassador to Apple because in those days, Windows didn't really exist or if it did, it was lousy. And so almost all the application sales Microsoft had were either PC Word or Mac products. because it really wasn't Windows yet. So like I introduced Office in 1989 in the Mac,

and it didn't come out on Windows for two more years because there really wasn't a good enough version of Windows and enough the Office apps weren't really done right to do it yet. There was no PowerPoint on Windows, et cetera. So it's kind of, it was an important job. It was kind of a funny job because Microsoft and Apple kind of loved and hated each other all the same time. Apple was suing Microsoft, and yet we had way more revenue off Mac products

and D.C. products, particularly in the U.S. So it's kind of a funny deal. So I was a marketing guy. Well, I'm sorry, but I can't resist. So what you're talking about is you're talking about the era, and you're talking about working with applications, and you're talking about the era where Microsoft rises to the top of the application heap, and things like Office become eventually the standard.

And they get that via the Mac. People don't realize that the reason Windows Office and Windows were so successful was because Microsoft got a head start in all of its competitors doing apps for a graphical user interface system. because they were so early and so successful on the Mac. So we had this mandate from Bill Gates that we would make $100 in revenue every time a Mac got sold. And Apple used to tell us, we used to exchange secret information with Apple, where we would tell them, they would tell us how many units they shipped that month,

and we would tell them how many units of Excel and where did we ship that month. And this guy at Apple named Matt Cobb, who I went to business school with, he and I would call each other up once a month and have this secret. powwow. And that... Has up for a while. Yeah. Right, because, you know, the legend is that you guys were always at each other's

throat. Well, that was true also. And, you know, Windows certainly bears an eerie similarity to the Mac, right? So, you know, that's all true. But nonetheless, our futures were intertwined. You know, when I introduced Excel, we were competing with Lotus. And one of the things that was funny about it was that I'm a really nice guy. and by that I mean just compared to most people I know

I'm considered a fun, nice, amiable guy and the guy at Lotus was a little more standoffish. And so the Apple guys really liked me because I was so nice and also because they considered the Mac a baby platform, the guys at Lotus versus 1,23 in the PC, Lotus 1-2-3, which is the preeminent product of the mid-80s.

And so what happened was that I would tell people that Excel in a Mac was better than Lotus 1-2-3 and a PC. And nobody at Lotus would do that. that. And so it blew the Apple guys away and they realized that they had something that they could use, you know, to sell their businesses. One of the other things you will forget about this era was that there was very little market for consumers buying PCs and software. It's mostly businesses. I mean, there was people that did hobbyist stuff in their PC, but because there was no, the exception of like comp you serve and this weird stuff, there really wasn't a reason or using Quick and to write down all your checks that you wrote. It wasn't much of a reason to use a PC at home. Recipes, games, games. you know, it was still kind of a hobbyist thing. So mostly what you were doing in those days was selling to business. It's not to consumers.

So you mentioned... Almost all. Right. You mentioned that towards the end, especially, you're basically the main point person with Apple for the Macintosh line. So is that, is it because of that that you end up at next, at around 1991, I guess? Kind of.

What happened is I was, I introduced Excel. And then right after, in between the time we announced it and the time that we shifted, Steve Jobs was famously deposed by John Scully at Apple. That's in the summer of 1985, for those of you who care. And so Steve sulked for a while and then went off to start next. And when he started next, he was very secretive about it. And then a couple years later, when he launched the thing, it didn't work for all, he started looking for someone good to run marketing because he had lousy marketing. So he tried to hire me a bunch of times because he knew I'd done such a good job on Excel to, and I only met him a couple times, to run marketing at next. And I turned him down a couple times, and then finally I left and did it.

So I kind of did it. You know, when I was at Microsoft, I went from 400 people to 8,000, 8,500 people. And most people thought it was great and wanted to stay there forever. And I didn't really like it that much. I mean, it was kind of like, you know, people were sort of aggressively negative about each other. It was really political. It seemed like a big company to me. I wanted to be in a smaller environment.

So I was kind of happy to leave. And so what I did was I went to work for Steve as kind of a bigger fish in a smaller pond, if you will, which was really fun. I'm really glad I did it. And we became really good friends because I, you know, Next was in trouble and trying to figure out what to do. And, you know, he and I just thought the same way. So it was really a fun deal. I'm glad I did it. It was an odd thing to do.

People at Microsoft just thought I was weird. No one was leaving Microsoft in those days. But I just, it wasn't really for me. Its environment was just different than kind of the way I'm cut. So I did that. And then later, after I ran my internet company and sold it, I went to work for Steve again. Yeah, well. He was back turning it out.

But we'll get to that. Yeah, I'll touch on that towards the end. I just want to, I saw on your LinkedIn profile, the only thing you have for next is you say it was the best. of times it was the worst of times. So like as you're, as it's a struggle, it's a struggle, right, but it's also, it was more fun, is what you're saying? Yeah, well, you know, nothing wrong with a Dickens quote in there.

But yeah, so, I mean, the thing is, is that we were a small company competing with both Microsoft and Sun and also PC companies because we were selling expensive workstations to big, big companies and to education and stuff. So you were in kind of the major. leagues, but we were kind of the smallest company in that environment. So it was kind of a mixed bag in terms of, you know, what resources you had and how much scale you could get to and all that stuff. So I was, if I was, if I felt underemployed at Microsoft, I felt overemployed at next. Let's put it that way. You know, the first month I was in there, I was in meetings with

Michael Dell and Andy Grove of Intel, you know, Steve would just drag me everywhere. You know, I did everything with Steve. And so I got to do great things. However, next, next will almost out of money like five times. It was really a crazy time. And a lot of decisions, some decisions that Steve made were terrible. There's a really good book about the Steve Jobs at Next called Becoming Steve Jobs, which was written by Brent Schlender, which I highly recommend for people because it's, in addition to having fabulous quotes from me and Bill Gates all over it, it's just really accurate.

You know, Brent Schlender knew Steve really well, and the Walter Isaacson book, which everyone kind of read, and they made that shitty movie out of, doesn't really talk about how and why Steve changed. It's more of a breathless highlight film. And so if you want to understand Steve, what was going on with them, it's better to read that book.

That's a really good book. I highly, highly recommend that one also over the Isaacson book. Yeah. And Walter's defense, it's hard to write a book when a guy's dying and you're talking to him all the time. So he didn't do anything wrong. It's just hard to get it right. So I believe that you're at next from like 91 and 93.

So I'm trying to... About two years. Right. So I want to... Here's what happened. They were about to go out of the hardware business. They, for various reasons, their chip strategy was... They got kind of screwed over by Apple and IBM forming an alliance.

And so they had to eventually get out of the hardware business. And when I left next to go back to Seattle, I told Steve this was going to happen. And I also told him that the guy he had hired to... be the C-O-O at next, who was a guy named Peter Van Kylanberg, was kind of bad news, that he was lying to Steve and lying to us and that it wasn't going to end well. And Steve was really mad at me. And then within three months, I told him like five things, and all of them came true within like three months, just as it happened, not because I'm a genius.

And so it was kind of amazing that this happened. And so he did something he probably never done in his whole life, but he called me up and apologized, which was a landmark moment. And so he apologized to me. And it kind of, even though I'd already left to come back to Seattle, it kind of cemented our friendship in this weird way because I had told him all this stuff not out of spite or malice, which is what he thought just because it was true.

And so that really changed our friendship in a major way. And he became a smallish software company that sold tools to big companies. And then when the Internet came along, they sold some tools to enable e-commerce. and then eventually Apple Bottom. I hope if time permitting that we will come back to that Apple story. Yeah, I will definitely. I know a lot about it. So I was framing the year 1993-ish because we're going to get into Starwave here,

but I should point out that in 1993 the web exists, but it isn't a thing yet. So if you could... It doesn't really exist. I mean, it exists. So I knew about it. it because the guy Tim Berners-Lee, who basically invented the World Wide Web, he invented it on Next machines at this research institute in Switzerland. So, you know, we all knew about it and Next had lots of educational customers. To give you a perspective on it, in 1991, when I left Microsoft to go to work for Next, I got a business card that said VP of marketing on it.

And it said, it said Mike Slade and it had the address, it had the fax number, had the mailing address. and then it said Mike Slade at Next.com. And I was like, what is this app signed? I'd never seen it before. And no business cards in the world had those on it, but because Next had educational customers, everybody emailed each other inside and outside of the company. So at Microsoft in 1990 and 1991,

you couldn't email people unless they worked at Microsoft. Right, because they were afraid of viruses and things like that, so they didn't want an outside connection? No, there just simply wasn't done. It was just an internet. It would be like having a sat phone or calling the moon. It just wasn't done. It didn't occur to anybody.

Nobody did at any company. So I was like, wow, this is really internety. And we had an FTP program for downloading pictures. And I got there and a guy showed me how to download dirty pictures on my next machine in black and white. And I'm like, how are you doing that? And he was doing this thing called Gofer to connect to the University of Minnesota server. and I'm like, really, you're talking to a computer at a different place? How are you doing that?

Like, it just didn't occur to people unless it was some big corporate network, you know, where you connected buildings or something. So next is where we all learned about the notion of two computers talking to each other in different companies or different places, if you will, right? Not inside of a corporate network. So when I left next and came back to work for Paul Allen, this was when AOL was starting to get really big. and when CompuServe and Prodigy were starting to fade,

because AOL was a lot more easy to use than those services were. They were pretty geeky and text-based. So Paul Allen, who had been a co-founder of Microsoft and who I'd gotten to know because he bought my beloved Portland Trailblazers, he had this idea in 1993 called The Wired World, and he said the world was going to be connected someday, which was correct, and that we should do something about it. And so he tried to buy AOL, he almost,

bought it and then he backed off. He owned 26% of it at one point and he sold it. He was a billionaire back when there weren't many billionaires. I mean, there really weren't many billionaires at all. Now there are lots of them. And he said to me, you come work for me in Seattle and I'll, we can look at cool stuff that is on this general theme of a multimedia wired world, which would be the internet today, but nobody knew that then. Well, because this was the era of everyone trying interactive TV and the information super high Yeah, I'll get to that. Exactly right.

And so he said all that, and he said, why don't you find something? If you find something you're excited about and I'm excited about, you run it and I'll fund it. I'll give you some upside. So I shook his hand and moved to Seattle. No contract, nothing. So as you point out, in early 1993, Sun and Silicon Graphics and Microsoft and all these other people were screwing around what was called interactive TV. And there was this trial that was going on in Orlando, Florida, where Time Warner had a cable system there. And they were going to do this really fancy, schmancy interactive TV trial.

And SGI beat out Sun for the right to do it. It's called the Full Service Network. Exactly. And it was a disaster. And all the demos where you're sitting on your TV watching a show and then you click on the jeans and buy them or, you know, a phone call comes in. A lot of the scenarios are actually the scenarios you see in Back to the Future 2. If you watch, it's a shitty movie. But if you watch Back to the Future 2, a lot of these scenarios are in that movie of like phone calls on your TV and stuff like that.

And they got it completely wrong because everybody thought that TV was where it was at, even though the TV is a closed system, doesn't have a keyboard, et cetera, et cetera. And your computer is a very versatile system, right? So everybody got it wrong, but never mind that. So while they all got it wrong, people were screwing around with the Internet. And so I didn't really know whether ALL would be the most popular servers. Microsoft was going to introduce a competitor to it called MSN or whether the web would be popular or whatever. No one really thought the Internet would be popular. It needed a high-speed connection, and you got a 14-4 modem maybe,

and it needed a TCPIP stack on your computer. Windows didn't have that. You had to go download it separately. etc, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I sat in the room with Paul, and I said, regardless of platform, here are 10 ideas. And we brainstormed all day long. Some were his ideas, some were mine. And of the 10 ideas, nine were marginal or obvious, and one was really good.

And the one that was really good was doing the world's biggest sports section. Because I'd been a sports writer. He was a sports nut. I would argue I'm even more of a sports nut than he is, but it's close. And so he loved that idea. And we did a bunch of things at Starwave. We did CD-ROM titles, which are kind of like websites, before there were websites delivered on a disc,

with Clint Eastwood, with Peter Gabriel, with Sting, with the Muppets. We did some interactive TV prototyping, and we did a whole bunch of online service prototypes. We did a sports one, did a news service one, an entertainment one, a family one. And the sports one was obviously the cool one. And over time, we spent all of our energy and all of our time on this thing. And so we built a team of about 150 people in 1993, 1994, building all the back-end stuff to deliver a 24 hour a day,

seven-day-a-week, interactive sports service. And so that meant writing your own publishing system, writing your own web server, writing your own ad server, writing your own melt-a-media server, video server. We did all the stuff that no one had ever done before. We parsed news fees and never done that before. and at the same time, because I was working for a billionaire, you know, we weren't going to run out of money.

And so I went to Sports Illustrated and ESPN and I said, you guys should partner with us because we have all these resources and building a great development team and a great engineering team. And we're not evil big companies that will screw you like, say, Microsoft. We're just a little great guys and I'm a great guy. And after like two years of selling ESPN agreed to partner with us. So you approached them, they didn't come to you? We approached them.

Yeah, we approached them and Sports Illustrated. Guess who ran the interactive group at Time Inc. Walter Isaacson. And what did he say? He said, no, we're doing our own thing. So I said, okay. Pathfinder, yeah. The Pathfinder, exactly.

So anyway, so what happened is that after, like I said, two years of selling and the Internet's starting to get going and the other thing starting to fall by the way, in October of 94, we launched a prototype news sports service called Satchel Sports, named after Satchel Page. And it was so good and an impressed ESPN so much that it accelerated the negotiations. We did it without them. We did it ourselves. And so then we finally got this deal done with them in February or January. I had to convince Paul to guarantee him a bunch of money.

And then in April of 1995, the NCAA Final Four was in Seattle. It was the year that UCLA won the NCAA tournament with the O'Bannon brothers who were later famous for suing for merchandise rights. But anyway, and so we launched that weekend at the Kingdom in Seattle, and it was an instant hit. It was number one. The minute it launched, it was a big deal. We had video highlights up in the Internet in April of 1995, but the whole thing was amazing. And so it was just a huge hit. And from the moment it was a huge hit, it was obvious that we were going to be in bed with the SPN for a long time.

And so in short order, we launched a deal through the NBA's website together with the SPN and the NBA, the NFL, NASCAR. And then Disney bought ESPN's parent company, Cap Cities. And once they bought them, we became extremely strategic because Cap Cities had been one of those companies that didn't want to spend any money on this stuff. They wanted somebody else to spend the money. So they let us own and operate the service with their brand. Disney thought that was stupid and wanted to do it the other way around. I want it was like a joint venture or they bought us or whatever. And so once Disney bought them, we spent probably 30 months in various levels of

negotiation with Disney, which ended with them buying us. But it took a long time. Can I spend a lot of time at Disney? Can we go into some of the details of this here? You know, I've spoken to people like Mark Levy of sports line and also, you know, people. Yeah, not Mark. Mike, what's his name? Mike, Mike.

Mike, sorry, Mike. I apologize. But, you know, because. you know, people, you know, that started at Hotwired and Slate and things like that. And so I'm curious about the idea of, you know, the web isn't always on 24-7 information medium. Do you guys launch with like live sports scores or is that something that you adapt over time? Like I'm curious about. We launched with live. We totally launched off.

So what we did was that in 1993, in 1993, in 1993, in 1993, we launched, sorry, 1993, both Microsoft and other people had done these CD-ROM titles that had this feature where you could connect via a modem and do a periodic update of the stats. So they launched things that were kind of like encyclopedias, right? And then you could get an update. So what we did was we licensed the sports ticker feed, which was used then to like scroll scores across stadiums and stuff, right? And it was owned by ESPN, actually. And we licensed it and we had this genius guy who had a PhD in linguistics who parsed it. And it wasn't designed to be parsed.

It was like Gobblebee Gooke. He figured out how to parse it all the time. That is, you could, the fee would come by and he could turn it into like a browsable database that said like, you know, today's Friday. Friday, NFL scores, recap, box score, all that. Friday, MLB, AL, Mariner's, right? And we wrote this visual basic prototype to take his server work and display it, and it blew everyone away. And the sports circuit guy said, no one's ever done that before. We didn't even know you could do that.

So we were really the first guys to ever do it, right? This was like a year and a half before we launched. And so then we really knew we had something when we did that. So, no, this was always on, always was on. The April 1st, 1995 version of ESPNSportZone.com is surprisingly similar to the version today. Of course, it's better today in a million ways, right? And it's got tons of video and tons of other great things. But the basic meat and potatoes of the scoreboards and the recaps and the stats is exactly the same.

So, right. And so getting more into the weeds about this, from what I've read from articles at the time, you know, this is before the era of the world. things like content management systems, but you guys... We wrote our own. Right, you guys, I feel like you guys had to pioneer a lot of that stuff. We wrote everything. We literally wrote everything because not because we wanted it, we had no choice.

We wrote a content management system. We wrote an internal publishing system that was basically like a version of Word that ran on a server, right? They let you edit, italicize, format. We had a system for tagging photos from the various Y services. We wrote our own video stuff. We wrote on an ad server. There were no ads. servers. We didn't measure the ads, right? There weren't many ads. Literally everything that you

need today, that a lot of times you can just get from shareware, we had to write from scratch. And what about... What about the ads, though? So you guys are designing the sites for someone like ESPN or eventually ABCNews.com and stuff like that, but you're designing the site, you're functionally running the site, are you also doing the ad sales and things like that? So what happened is, in 1995, as we were about to become a business, we had no idea what the business model would be. I mean, no one did, right? I'm not saying we didn't.

Literally, no one did. No one knew either A, how big the internet was going to be, or B, what form of revenue would eventually accrue to you, if any. So the three choices were you could make money off ads, which seemed unlikely. You could make money off people paying a subscription, which seemed more likely, frankly, but back then. Or you could make money off merchandise. or other kind of things.

And so Paul Allen ordered me to have all three kinds of revenue streams done by September 30th, 1995. So when we launched in April, and this was a web service, there was no ALL version, it was just an internet website, we had ads. We sold Gatorade an ad package at launch for $30,000 a month. And they said, what will we get for $30,000? And we said, everything. The entire site was just going to getterate banner.

One big banner after another. Right, because it's not CPM. It's just, you're just sponsoring the whole thing. Well, it kind of was, and we didn't measure it, but no one knew, right? So, and then by fall we had spun up a store to sell merchandise, like college jerseys and ESPN stuff, and we had also done two premium services. One was we launched what is now the insider portion of ESPN.com, the portion of the portion of the site that you pay 40 or 50 bucks a month for, that's premium content. And then

it was some AP stuff they wouldn't give away and some video, some better photos and some columnists and stuff. It's kind of like what it is now, actually. And then we also launched the first fantasy football in the fall of 1995. We had 4,000 people who paid us 40 bucks. So we invented fantasy football on the internet. That's so funny how much that comes up in the sports sites about how the fantasy was so tied to sports going on the web. It makes sense because it's such a clear, easy revenue stream. No, no, 4,000 people. It was tiny because we paid, we charged for it,

and we barely worked because it was really complicated software problem. And then we also, so we launched all three of those things by September, because Paul ordered us to because he was, he didn't really understand, he was worried that we wouldn't have any revenue. So we had, so we built our own e-commerce system, you know, everything. A guy left. He took the password to the server with him and threatened to leave still. It was terrible, right?

But it was fascinating. So we invented all this stuff. So you said that almost as soon as you launch, it's wildly successful. And I think you'll find, I found this quote from an article in 96 sort of amusing where they say, Sports Zone's numbers are staggering. It averages 7.5 million hits a day. And that sounds small today, but it really would have been. staggering for 1996.

So when it launched, there was a Spark Station, which seemed like a mainframe, right, on the CTO's desk, and that's what it was on. It wasn't in a data room. It wasn't in a server room and some off-site thing. It certainly wasn't on the cloud.

There was no cloud. It was on a Guy's Sparkstation. And then it got maxed out. We put a RAM and Sparkstation. We put a second processor in it, and it got maxed out. So we wrote software to load balance between servers.

1995. Okay. Like that would have been a multi-billion dollar business if we spun it out, right? So we had, because we had no choice, right? So yeah, all that stuff was literally, and our strategy was pretty funny. And both the guy from ESPN, Dick Glover, and I would say the same thing all the time. We would just say our strategies to get out ahead and run like hell. That's all we did. How, how, how, how, how, how, how, how close in partnership were you with, with ESPN? Like are you getting, are you working with their reporters? Are you getting content from them and vice versa? Are they promoting you?

Yeah. So when we launched, we had 150 people working on the site and they had three. And it wasn't because they were bad guys. It's because they just didn't have any budget, right? So then we started sending people there and they started sending, we called them prisoner exchanges. And they started sending people to Seattle, right? And what happened is, as it got more successful, it got people at ESPN more excited about it. But the funniest thing is, so it was a very complicated negotiation because we didn't know what the business was going to be.

And so we were guaranteeing a bunch of money. And Paul Allen, even though he was a billionaire, was pissed about it. Because why are we guarantee him all his money? So what we gave them was we did all the work, if you will, right, with a few exceptions. We did all the technical work, and the entire reporting staff was in Seattle originally. Later on, it changed, and everything happened in Seattle, unless it was wire stuff that we just parsed and dressed up with headlines. But then what happened is they said that in exchange for guaranteeing us $2.5 million a year, which is what we did for five years, they would promote it with television advertising, which would be worth X.

And so we were the first guys to ever do a deal where you got, you know, Internet technology exchange. for TV promotion. We started doing that. And they said, here's the number of ads we'll run, here's where we'll run, here's the rate card,

here's a discount, blah, blah, blah. So you could do the math and figure out that it was allegedly worth it, right? Then they said, oh, we'll do one more thing.

We are starting to do this thing. They had this thing then called 2858. So you know how now when you watch ESPN, the bottom portion of the screen is a scoreboard that scrolls across,

right? It's a horizontal. Right, right. The ticker. Right, the ticker. So the ticker then appeared twice an hour at 28 minutes after and 58 minutes after for two minutes, then it went away because people were afraid of cluttering up the screen, which seems laughable now. Right. That's true. So what they said was, oh, guess what we're going to do for you? When we run the 2858s, we're going to put, in addition to the scores that say San Diego 3, Seattle 2, we're going to say H-TTP, colon, backslash, backslash, ESP, Nnet.Sportzone.com. Go online to see the best or whatever during those two times an hour. And we said, what the fuck is that?

And Paul said, you should value that at zero. And that single-handedly made the business. So we invented, I should say they, they invented the idea of actual promotion of website URL. So it was the first time it had ever been done anywhere. Was that concession they gave us in the negotiation, which we decided was worth zero and we're completely wrong about it was worth of fortune right it's always really the first people we were the first people to ever do it it never and it wasn't an ad it

was during content right so it was a huge deal and they invented it was their idea it was just absolutely brilliant changed everything literally changed everything um and that was all then so anyway yeah go ahead so i'm just it's funny how we didn't even know what had a value it much So I said it was worth a lot. I was like saying to Paul, this could be kind of cool. And he was like, yeah, but what's at worth? Who knows? And, you know, he was right.

You know, how would you know, right? So Starwave develops a bunch of different things like there's, like I said, ABCNews.com. But then there was also what was, you did NBA. There was a Mr. Showbiz, which sort of was like the first, you know, entertainment news sort of site on the web and things like that. Yeah, that's right. But it was always the ESPN site that was always for you guys, the big cahuna, right? Our plan was to have a whole bunch of businesses like ESPN.com with different partners. Mr. Showbiz, we thought we'd launch on our own and then someone would partner with us.

We'd get a TV show for it. We came very close to doing a deal with Dow Jones for Wall Street Journal.com. Like I would say to the 10-yard line, then it went away. I tried to get CNN to do a deal with us, but they didn't like that we were in business with ESPN. I tried to get ABC to deal with us, and they just were hesitant. And then once Disney bought them, everything kind of changed. And so once Disney bought the company, you know, we were strategic. The guys at Disney were kind of driving the bus on the strategy.

This guy, Jake Weinbaum, who was a brilliant guy. He and I and Tom Staggs and Kevin Mayer ended up being sort of the kitchen cabinet of Disney's Internet strategy. And so even though I didn't work for Disney, I was there helping them figure out what to do. We built in 1997 when Disney owned part of us, but not all of us, or maybe I was, sorry, 1996 when they didn't own any of us yet. We built ABCNews.com on spec. We built it on spec like a spec house. And I went to this ABC annual retreat at the Buildmore Hotel in Phoenix, and I showed it to them.

And we built it just purely on spec. We had no contract, no handshake, nothing. And we blew them away. They were like, oh, my God. And what's funny is the person who was the most blown away was the president of Disney. It was named Michael Ovidz. He hadn't been fired yet. He came up to me like, oh, my God, this is fabulous.

So eventually they did this deal in early 1997 to buy part of us with an avenue to eventually buy the rest of us. Once that happened, our strategy and their strategy kind of became the same strategy, which was to deemphasize this stuff we were already doing that wasn't sports, get ABC News, going and then eventually build a portal, which we did together called go.com. Right. So how does there's this convoluted, you don't have to explain it, but somehow info seeks involved and then. So it's a great story.

So what happened is that, so Disney bought three eighths of Starwave. And some of that money went to Paul Allen and some of it went to the employees. But most of it, most it went to the company. Someone to Paul, some of the company. The company was still losing money, but it was plugging along. and Disney had board control, even though they only had three-eighths of the company. And then they had an option to buy the rest of the company. And the way Paul structured the deal was, in the first two years, the option had a cap.

And after that, it was just at fair market value of whatever the asset was worth, which was supposed to worry them because the Internet stocks were going up so much. And so they were incented to buy it early. So what happened is we were in the state in 1997 and part of 1998. we were kind of like an iron curtain country, right? We were like Czechoslovakia or something. We were partly owned by Disney. The employees didn't have any liquidity,

but they kind of called the shots, but they couldn't tell us what to do because we had other shareholders. It was kind of a mess. And I was the chairman, so kind of a messy job. Like Michael Eisner called me at one time, it told me to build an Angels website for the Angels

because they owned the Angels. And I was like, well, but you don't want to pay me for it. He goes, no, I just paid to buy the company. And I'm like, well, you don't own the company. I got other shareholders. Fuck you. You go mad. So anyway, so what happened is I kept, and they wanted to build this big portal

and we were doing all this great work on the portal. And I said, look, the problem is you're going to lose all the good guys unless you give them some liquidity because all these other companies have gone public. And so all their competitors are making money and they aren't, you know. So and they know what the cap is on buying it. So they're just going to leave. So they just said, well, we'll just buy the company fund. So they're going to buy the company.

And it was going to be an okay outcome for everybody. It was going to value Starwave at about $350 million. So then what happened is this guy, Tom Staggs, who later became the CEO of Walt Disney, and is a really smart guy. We were kind of in talks with all these guys who weren't Yahoo. Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, CNET, all these guys who were kind of also getting on the portal business

because it was pretty obvious that Yahoo was the king. Google didn't exist yet. Google actually didn't exist. So what happened is that of all the companies, they like Infoseek the best, probably because they were cheapest. The stock was the cheapest. So what Tom Staggs did was he made an offer to Paul Allen to buy his shares out at that cap price of $250 million. And so for about a minute, he owned most of StarWave, but not the employee's shares. So he owned about 85 or 90 percent of StarWave, but not my stock and not the stock.

the rest of the employee stock, which was like 400 people. Then he took that asset and traded it for half of Infoseek. And in between buying it and selling it, he marked it up 3X. So he took the $300-something million worth of Starwood he owned, told Infoseek it was worth a billion. InfoSeek said, okay, and they bought half of InfoSeek with it. So we, the employees suddenly got a whole bunch of Infoseek stock that valued our stake at a billion dollars. So the good news was he bought half of Info Seek for cheap, if you will, and took us along for the ride. So it was all great.

The problem was he then owned not quite half of InfoSeek and couldn't get them to do what he wanted to do. And during that year of screwing around with Info Seek for they bought the rest of it, it cost them a lot of time because it's really cumbersome. And that's when I left and a lot of good people left because it was just kind of a disaster. Right, because that was great for us, but they should have bought the whole thing or something. because, I mean, I'm glad he did it. I'm going to be wrong. I was wonderful. But he ended up not, they had to, everything was a big negotiation,

and the InfoC guys had figured out that the only way to get them off the dime was to buy all of InfoC, which they wanted to do anyway. They wanted to get sold. So, right, that was the whole go.com thing and everything, which, you know. Yeah, which took too long. And then what happened is they put Bornstein in charge of it. And there was this thing where Eisner told me he wanted me to run it, and then he denied it.

And I was pissed off. And Bornstein didn't even really want to do it. He was pissed up and it was a mess. It was a classic Disney mess. So I left and I stayed around in consulting for a while and then I left and Steve had wanted me to come run marketing for Apple. We went back to Apple. I talked to him a lot of that going back to Apple. We were pretty good friends.

This is 98 basically. This is 97. 97. He goes, come run all marketing for Apple. And I'm like, I can't. I mean, this thing with Disney had an employment contract. I kind of knew I had to go through this 18-month process to get a. sold. So when I sell it, when we finally sell it, he goes, I go, look, I can't work there full

time. I got kids and everything, but I can work there part-time. He goes, great. So he hired me in 98 to be a part-time advisor to him on this executive team. So for six years, from 98 to 04, I commuted there every Monday and Tuesday and spent two whole days doing everything Steve did. Every meeting you went to the executive staff meeting, you know, design meetings, product meetings, advertising meetings. You know, I, You might need to do another episode. In fact, we definitely do if you'll be willing. Sure.

Because I don't want to take up your whole afternoon. And also, I haven't researched this era enough. But let me ask you just a couple questions about that era of 98 to 2004 Apple. Sure. Number one, you know, history would say, oh, Steve comes back to Apple and turns it all around and everything is great. But it always occurred to me that, you know, he was gone. I was going to say, well, this question specifically, because he had been gone for basically a generation of Apple employees. So when Steve comes back, I'm sure there was some long timers that were still there from when he was there at the first time.

But when he comes back, was there a lot of pushback and politics? And it couldn't have been that everyone was was on board with everything Steve wanted to do when he came back, right? So when Steve came back, first he consulted for a while. and then they fired Gilamilio, who was kind of a bozo. And so then they asked him to be the interim CEO, and the board made the mistake of asking him. And because they asked him, he said, I'll only do it under these conditions.

So the first condition was, he said, the first condition was he said, get rid of the board. This board sucks, and he'd hand-picked a new board. The second condition was, he said, I get to fire anybody I want. And so when I got there, he said to me, Here's my job at Apple. Half the people here are good.

Half the people are bozos. I have to keep enough of the good ones and get rid of the bozos as fast as I can. But it was easier than you think because the head of hardware and the head of software and the head of legal were all from Next. So even though Apple bought Next, really Next kind of bought Apple. Because Avi Tomanian had been at Next forever. John Rumson had been the head of hardware at Next. Those guys came to Apple, actually before Steve came.

back. They came back as soon as next bought, got bought by Apple. And so he had people, and Sina Tamaden, who ran all the apps group, also worked at Next. And so when I got there, of the nine people in the executive staff meeting, five of us have worked at Next, on the executive staff at Next. So that's why it was easier for them than you might have think, because it was like, it's like going out on a date with your old girlfriend. You already know what she wants for dinner, you know, you know everything. We're all buddies. It's like a coup almost. You guys took over Apple. Absolutely. It was kind of by accident. So what happened is when Apple bought next, and Emilio was in charge, Obie was at next, and then Steve kind of arranged for Rubenstein to go back to Apple. And so he had two of his trusted guys running hardware and software, the two most important jobs, right? And so then he heard from them what a bozo Emilio was. You know, he fell asleep in his own staff meeting, was spending millions of dollars, building a new bathroom for his office, you know, stupid stuff. So anyway, you kind of knew what was going to happen.

But when he came back, what was easier about it was that he had people he already kind of got, as opposed to people he didn't trust in key positions. And then he had this guy, one of the unsung heroes of the Apple turnaround is the CFO, Fred Anderson. Fred Anderson was a great guy who Steve had met before, but Steve, they loved each other. The guy was a great guy. He was key to running all the stuff Steve didn't want to be bothered with. and he did a great job it's a long story obviously

but that's one of things people don't really realize is he had two of three of his trusted lieutenants he'd worked with it next so he knew them well when I research this era more maybe you'll come back but one other question about that era

relates to you know so this is this legendary turnaround of a company that's you know on the brink of death and then now is you know the greatest success of our modern tech era how much of that

when you're there in this era is it because because the web was happening, it's blowing a hole in the tech industry wide open. And so is that era, is there almost like there's a space created that Apple can sort of find its niche and start to do things like this hub strategy and things like that? How much do you think was that era and the web happening allowing Apple to have that breathing room to eventually resuscitate itself and succeed? Well, it's a good question. I think it helped because if you think about it, once the Internet got popular in 95, 96, 97, 98, you know, if you were observant, even if you didn't have any research, you'd figure out that,

geez, I'm spending a lot of my time just looking at a web browser and doing email, right? Not using Word or Excel or PowerPoint or whatever or Adobe Illustrator or something, right, or Quicken. You know, I'm spending, you did a time-in motion study, right? you were spending more than half your day just looking at the browser in your email, or chat or whatever. So if you're doing that, it doesn't really matter what you're doing it on, right? The whole advantage of Windows, thousands of applications, most of which were business-oriented applications or games,

was kind of irrelevant, right? So that helped, but it wouldn't have mattered if Apple hadn't built good stuff, right? And even so, you know, their market share of PCs was like 2%, and then maybe it got to 4%. And I remember I had this conversation with Steve one time where I was like, look, we're so small that we could double in sales and probably people wouldn't even notice, right? Because it's kind of an advantage because our share is so small, right?

And it was really small. I mean, a PC sold max were maybe a couple points. Maybe they doubled it at some point. And then the big thing is the iPod, right? I mean, the iPod is the thing that really changed Apple because people had permission to buy an Apple product without having to give up a Windows, right?

Right. And that was a really big deal, even though it was originally a Mac-only product. That was a really big deal. Yeah, that's so interesting to me because remember, originally, when you read those articles about the iPod launch, it's like, well, and even I think Steve says this,

well, this is going to encourage people to buy Macs. No, no, it was a big fight. There were two things about it. One was that it required firewire. There was no USB 2.0 yet. And because it required, firewire, all Macs had firewire, and some PCs had it. Sony PCs had it, and then other PCs only had it if you got an external card and installed it. So it was very difficult to use an

iPod on Windows until USB 2.0, which is like three years later. So at first, it was for Macs and geeks, basically, right? Unless someone bought it for you and voted it for you. Because remember, what you were doing was there was no store. So for the first, three years of the iPod until late 2003, the only way you could use it, or two years, let's say, was to take your own music, copied off CDs, legally or illegally, get music, and then side-load it from iTunes onto your iPod, right?

That's the only way you could do it. There was no store. Right. So that seems pretty hard today. It didn't seem that hard then, but it seems pretty hard, right? And that was in the days when people made mixed CDs, ripped mix burn. Apple had an ad campaign before the iPhone,

I'm called Rip Mix Burn, where you would use iTunes to, you know, to make CDs. So anyway, but eventually it really worked. You know, iPod sales went up every quarter forever and ever and ever and ever, right? Even when it from Mac only to Mac plus PC, to then when iTunes shipped and it was, and the USB 2.0 shipped to the mini, to the nano, you know, it could be better and better and better. So are you there to witness when they stop becoming just a Mac-only company and they realize that this, is they're in everything company. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely.

I was there, so I was there until late 2003 when Steve got sick. We launched the iPod two weeks after 9-11, 2001. And it started to sell better, and then the Mini made it sell a lot better, and then USB 2.0 in the store made it sell even better. People forget about the Mini. They always talk about the Nano. They forget about the Mini. The Mini was the first, before the

mini, people thought the key to the iPod was capacity, 5, 10, 20 gig, and that people who used it had giant music libraries, like I did. But the mini came in 2 and 4 gigabytes, had little tiny hard disk in it, not a flash drive, but it was cheaper and cuter. And Steve almost canceled it twice, but it was a huge hit.

So when that happened, you could kind of tell that the iPod was going to be a cultural phenomenon, not just a geek device. And then the store happened and then the nano, and it's everything else. iTunes for Windows was a really big deal, which Steve said he would never do. And then he said, first he said he would never do it,

and then he said, this is the best app on Windows. Well, he also didn't want to do an app store for the iPhone, too. But listen, again, we might have to come back and circle back to this whole era. So just two more questions, and then I've taken up more of your time and I already promised. you've worked with, you know, more than most people, you know, you've worked under Bill Gates, you've worked under Steve Jobs, you've worked with Rob Glazer for years, Rob's been on the show. I'm wondering if this is...

Yeah, I still work with Rock. Right, right, right. So I'm wondering, and this is my worst sort of softball magazine style question, but I'm wondering if there's one thing that you see in good entrepreneurs, like if there's one sort of like skill set or trade or anything like that about truly. great entrepreneurs since he worked with so many. It's hard to say. There's a great quote in the Brent Shlender book by Bill Gates where he goes, he goes,

Brent, this book should be called The Don't Try This at Home book. He said plenty of people have the asshole part down, not so many have the genius part down, which I think is a great quote because Steve Jobs was a genius. Bill Gates wouldn't tell you that, but he's a genius. And most people aren't. And so most entrepreneurs have. delusions of grandeur and think they're geniuses, right? And most of them aren't. And so you'll probably get feedback along the way that tells you if you are kind of genius-like or not in some way, right?

Now, the other thing about people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is they're very persistent. And so they have skills that most people don't have. One of them is persistence. Two is, and I don't know that's true for everybody. It's a certain interest for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They really, really, really like to work. Did Steve Jobs have a lot of hobbies? I don't think so. Vegetable garden, you know? He liked to work.

On Saturday afternoon he was doing email at home, right? He liked to work. So, you know, people think they like to work. Most people don't like to work. They much like to goof off, right? So, you know, that's fine, but then you're not going to be like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, right? And the other thing is, you know, really persistent people do have a little bit, especially

you when they're young, a little bit of a capacity for self-delusion, right, where they think something's done when it's not, and I think something's great when it's not, and they think other people's stuff isn't any good, even if it is, and that's what keeps them going, because it's easy to talk yourself out of anything, right? I mean, it really is. And so there's this weird thing where you have to know exactly what your competition is up to, and at the same time, think that there's no way they're as good at the stuff as you are, right? That makes any sense, right? You know? And so that's

a thing that I would certainly say both Bill Gates. They have announced Windows at the Windows on the World Window, a restaurant in New York City and the World Trade Center in 1983, okay? It didn't even ship to late 85 and it was a horrible product. Version 1, but I didn't do anything. You could play a reverse eye. I didn't do anything.

But he thought it was great, right? He told you it was great. that's sort of self-delusion. It's not like Donald Trump, but you do kind of believe in your own stuff, right? Steve would always say this stuff was, he'd tell you we were working on that in the lab, and he hadn't even thought about it until he mentioned it, right? He was just bullshitting you, you know? So

the ability to have credible BS, credible meaning you can't dispute it, and it will eventually come true, is very important. I thought like Trump, or Trump just lies like a little kid, right? He's like, oh, yeah, I didn't do that when he did. And you can prove

it. So it's a weird thing, but most great entrepreneurs have it, right? The ability to, like, you know, get that something could be done, when it could be done. So might as well pretend it's done already, as opposed to just making it up like my daddy's a fireman or something. And, of course, you can't be a genius. I mean, both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are geniuses in different ways. Steve Jobs loved the aesthetics of things.

When I worked at Next with him, we'd go for a walk at lunchtime, and we'd just walk around a parking lot critiquing cars. We just walk on and going ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, pretty, pretty, ugly camp. Now this doesn't work. We're going to like the butt, you know, for like an hour. It was like girl watching. We could do it for cars, right? Well, and you've, you've sat in on those, those breakfast meetings with Steve and Johnny

Ive and these great design. I used to go in the lab with Johnny I and Steve after lunch on Monday. I go to Steve's staff meeting. I get a sandwich night. He and I, before we met with Avi and his team to look over MacCost, I'm going to going to the lab and hang out with Johnny. And they would go over, and I was really sleepy. I had to take a 6 a.m. flight every Monday morning to go to Apple.

So I was getting up at 4.30, wolfing down coffee, going to the Seattle airport, flying to San Jose Airport, driving to Apple, sitting through a three-hour staff meeting, and then following Steve around breathlessly, and I was dying. By 1.30, I was in a closed, hot, windowless room, searching for caffeine. And Johnny and Steve will be talking about plastic extrusion. I'm like, dying. So we go over the iMac and the curve and the angle and the join and the mitre and all this crap. And then they'd go, they'd be totally lost.

And then they'd look at me and they go, what do you think? And I'd go, chip it. You know, sure. Where's the Coke machine? So, yeah, they were really into it. I mean, like, really into it. Okay, final question. And then I'm going to let you go.

You've been too generous already. People, especially in Seattle, tend to get successful by a sports team. You bought a sport. Do you still... Yeah, professional bowlers association. And you still, you and your partners still own that? Rob and I do. We own it, yeah.

And so I guess you're heavy, you're a serious bowler or just a fan, like, even people that buy NFL teams or NBA teams, you know, can't necessarily play basketball? I'm not that huge of a bowling fan. We thought and we still think, if you own the whole thing, you get to do things, things you can't otherwise do. That was really just pieces behind the boiling. Plus, it wasn't very expensive. But yeah, that was a good piece. But yeah, I'm a big sports fan, and I have, you know, if I could afford it, I would have bought a bigger team. But no, it's fun. It's really fun. All right. Mike Slade, thank you so much. And if you're willing, I will get in touch

again and we'll do another more Apple-centric episode possibly. But thanks for coming on the podcast and remembering all that things. You bet. No problem. My pleasure. If this is the first time you're listening to this podcast, please subscribe to us on your podcast app of choice. There's plenty more great internet history where that came from. And if you're a long-time listener, then you know what to do to help us out. Rate and review us on iTunes. Because iTunes gives credit to reviews and ratings, and the more great reviews we get, the more people will discover us. As always, there's more info on our website,

www.Internethistorypodcast.com. The show's Twitter handle is at NetHistoryPod, and my personal Twitter is at Brian MCC. Thanks for listening.